I will never understand why conservatives, right-wing wackos and self-avowed “free market” fellow-travelers have such a problem with William Jefferson Clinton.

When the man who signed the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 is passed off as the patriarch of “liberalism” in America, you know we are through the proverbial looking glass.

Clinton was not a liberal. But he sure did buy into the notion of “economic liberalization.”

Before embarking on a recitation of just how damaging Clinton’s presidency was to this country, let’s dispense with the “opposing ideas” notion laid out in the wake of the Republican and Democratic conventions.

Though it’s awfully romantic to think we are at a turning point in our nation’s history — the ideas of “conservatism” versus the ideas of “liberalism” — that’s all really just a ruse. Liberalism — progressive thought and anything resembling empathetic policy making — appears as dead as Robert Kennedy.

And it’s been dead for a while — at least in terms of “liberal” elected representatives serving the people on the national level. There are like, what, maybe, two? Maybe.

If you choose to vote in November, be clear about what you are doing. You can vote for a radicalized, far-right wing party fueled by angry, overwhelmingly white politicians utterly beholden to business and corporate interests like the Koch brothers. Or you can vote for a moderate Republican who will make lots of noise about raising taxes on “the rich” and has adopted the “radical” healthcare plan of requiring people to purchase insurance — a program beloved by Republicans from the 1970s until about, um, 2008. These “liberal” Democrats have stayed in war, fiddled while Social Security burned and are advised by the same men who brought you the economic collapse of 2008.

What a choice. Let’s hear it for a two-party system that really isn’t two parties at all, but shades of an oligarchy fueled by Super-PACs and a kind of quid-pro-quo form of representation that ensures the furtherance of our warped “free-market.”

Don’t gaze too long into looking-glass reality. Don’t buy into polarization politics. The bottom line, for the foreseeable future, is Americans may squabble over abortion and gay marriage and maybe even guns, but the fact is elected officials in our national government serve a small portion of citizens and the various corporate interests to which they are tied.

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Spew on all you want about Obama the socialist. History and fact simply don’t bear it out. If you honestly believe Obama is a foreign-born national sent to America to tear down our most-beloved institutions, or even a radicalized lawyer from Chicago committed to some kind of Marxist makeover, you are completely disconnected from reality.

There used to be a place for people who screamed about such matters. It was called the John Birch Society. Or the Ku Klux Klan. The Minutemen. Now, all those heavy thinkers — often tied to some Tea Party — have found a nice comfy home in the radicalized conglomeration of late known as the “Republican Party.”

Back to old William Jefferson Clinton. Like Clint Eastwood, he’s a likable enough guy. I would readily sit down for a few beers with either.

To many of us out here in the hinterlands, Clinton may have seemed an odd choice for the role of Crucial Convention Speaker. Wasn’t he, after all, the chucklehead who was caught with his proverbial pants down? Wasn’t he the guy who lied to the American people when he said “I did not have sex with that woman”?

Loyal Democrats will argue Clinton was the one guy since the dawn of Ronald Reagan who got the economy right. As he left office, his administration claimed it left a surplus for fiscal year 2000 of $237 billion, had reduced publicly held debt another $363 billion and said the Clinton-Gore budget could pay off publicly held debt by 2009.

And whether by chance or design — and strong evidence from the mouths of people Vice President Dick Cheney strongly suggest design — that surplus disappeared faster than buffalo wings at a Super Bowl party.

So Clinton and his record are something Democrats like to trumpet. They ignore other facts, however.

On Oct. 22, 2009, officials from the Clinton administration and congressional Republicans came to an agreement that was called the Financial Services Modernization Act, a law that was not only the most sweeping deregulation of the banking industry in our history, but a license for the formation of megalith financial companies and free pass for the start of practices that were the cause of the 2008 economic collapse.

The Financial Service Modernization Act of 1999 allowed the integration of banking, insurance and securities trading that had been outlawed by the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933. Glass-Steagall prevented the mixing of banks, brokerage houses and insurers. There was a wall between investment banks and commercial banks.

Why would Clinton do such a thing? By 1999, no one should have surprised by the move. Five years earlier he signed NAFTA into law, removing tariff protection between the United States, Canada and Mexico. Love it or hate it, “free markets” and deregulation are the hallmark of what is called the “liberalization” of economies.

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The triumph of what was called the “Chicago School” of economic theory, economic liberalization was the favored method of operation for South American dictators. In places like Chile, dictators privatized most publicly held assets, crushed labor unions and did away with large portions of public institutions.

Of course, if one spoke out against some private U.S. company coming in and buying up all the land or the water, you were labeled a socialist. And in places like Chile, you ran a good chance of being “disappeared.”

The Chicago School reached it’s zenith when Margaret Thatcher took power in the U.K. and Reagan ascended in the U.S. Both worked hard to deregulate the economy and depopulate unions.

William Jefferson Clinton, for all his folksyness and seemingly progressive tax policies, turned out to be another disciple of deregulation. His policies resulted in the massive monopolization of the communications industry during his administration and the formation of massive financial institutions immediately after his second term.

Here in Galesburg — where William Jefferson Clinton gave a speech in our high school — NAFTA paved the way for the relocation of Maytag to Mexico.

We can argue for days about Clinton’s speech at the DNC. We can pull it apart, put it under the microscope and fill plenty of cable-news time.

In the end, Clinton’s appearance was a wink and nod to the forces to which every president — Democrat or Republican — must pay allegiance. Our leaders must get in line behind economic liberalization.

It is the new religion in this country, writ large by mouthpieces preaching from pulpits of a faux two-party system.